The Peoples King (40 page)

As Prince of Wales, Edward had visited not only India but numerous other countries overseas, both within the Empire and outside it. His evident wish to meet the ordinary people of these countries, and his genuine friendliness towards them, had been met with appreciation and gratitude. Now, as Edward's love for Wallis and his wish to marry her became world news, spread by the newsreels and the press, these ordinary people felt great sympathy. Numerous telegrams of support arrived from nations all over the world. 'Barbados supports you. Our King can do no wrong', insisted a telegram from the Caribbean island. 'The People are with the King', declared a banner headline above news of the British crisis in the
Times of Ceylon.
⁹

On Saturday 5 December, Winston Churchill sent a letter of cheer to the King:

News from all fronts! No pistol to be held at the King's head. No doubt that this request for time will be granted. Therefore no final decision or Bill till after Christmas - probably February or March . . . Good advances on all parts giving prospects of gaining good positions and assembling large forces behind them.
¹

But it was too late. The King had already decided to give up his throne. 'Tell the Prime Minister', he told his adviser, Walter Monckton, on the morning of 5 December, 'that when he comes to see me this afternoon, I shall formally tell him that I have decided to abdicate.'
²
Monckton duly passed the King's message on to Baldwin. Later, Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, went to Stornoway House to give Beaverbrook the news. Several MPs were also told of the King's intention, as well as some of the newspaper editors. Very soon, word in the constituencies was circulating that the struggle between King and Prime Minister was over, with victory, as Beaverbrook put it, 'perching on the banners of Baldwin'.
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The information had not yet reached Churchill, however, who continued to search for a solution to the King's dilemma. On Sunday 6 December he was at Chartwell, his home in Kent, discussing the problem with his friends, Archibald Sinclair and Robert Boothby. They decided that the best way of avoiding abdication would be a public statement by the King that he would agree to accept the Cabinet's advice on the possibility of his marriage to Mrs Simpson. That way, since her divorce would not be made absolute until April, the question would be safely avoided for four months. The plan was put to the King on Monday morning. But he turned it down, on the grounds that it would not be honourable to play for time when 'his fundamental resolve' was unchanged, and unchangeable.
⁴
As Beaver­brook had told Churchill on Saturday morning on a visit to his Westminster flat, the King seemed to have given up the battle: 'I said "Our cock won't fight", and . . . that any further struggles to save him would do no good.'
⁵

When on 5 December Monckton had returned from his visit to Baldwin, he told the King that the Prime Minister wanted to see him once more, to satisfy himself that he had exhausted all possible solutions. On Tuesday 8 December Baldwin came to the Fort for this final talk - and to his horror, Edward noticed that he had brought a suitcase with him. This meant that he was planning to stay the night. 'The PM went down to wrestle with the soul of the young man, being prepared to stay all night if it was any use', noted the publisher Francis Meynell.
⁶
But as Edward wrote in his memoirs, he had already had quite enough of Baldwin - 'His part in my life was over, and I did not propose to have him on my hands that night, snapping his fingers, storing up little homely touches for his report to Parliament.' The King made it clear to Baldwin that he was welcome to stay for dinner, but not for the night. They had a last fruitless talk, followed by an evening meal with other guests. 'We were nine', recalled Edward - 'Mr Baldwin on my right, Sir Edward Peacock on my left; my brothers, Bertie and George, Tommy Dugdale, Walter Monckton, George Allen, and Ulick Alexander.'
⁷
It was a dinner, wrote Bertie in his own chronicle of events, that he was never likely to forget:

While the rest of us .. . were very sad (we knew the final decision [Edward] had made) my brother was the life & soul of the party, telling the PM things I am sure he had never heard before about unemployed centres etc. (referring to his visit in S. Wales). I whispered to W[alter] M[onckton] 'and this is the man we are going to lose.' One couldn't, nobody could, believe it.
⁸

Edward made sure that the royal crisis was never mentioned, not even once.
⁹

But it was at the forefront of everyone's mind. After the dinner, as Baldwin and Tom Dugdale drove back to London, the Prime Minister commented, 'This is making history. This is what I like.'
¹⁰
Everything seemed settled: Edward was going to abdicate, and Albert would be the new king. 'I had a letter this evening from la chere petite Duchesse,' Lady Milner recorded in her diary on 8 December, referring to the Duchess of York. The 'dear little Duchess', she wrote, had told her 'in a way that was most touching, that she and her husband were looking forward to be of service to "this dear country". This may and probably does mean all is decided. I hope so.'
¹¹

Then suddenly, there was a setback. From her refuge in Cannes, Wallis had made an intervention in the royal crisis that threatened to dash all of Lady Milner's hopes for Edward's abdication. On Monday 7 December, she had issued a statement to the press declaring that she was willing to renounce the King. She had realized - with horror - that Edward was moving inexorably towards abdication. It was now up to her, said Lord Brownlow, to pull him back from this final act.
¹²
'Ever since that awful last day at the Fort,' she wrote in her memoirs, 'much the same idea had been taking shape in my mind: I must wrench myself entirely out of David's life. Since he would not give me up, I would have to give him up and in a way that would leave him no choice but to accept this decision.' She felt there was no alternative. 'Apart from the moral considerations affecting his kingly position,' she said, 'my own self-respect was at stake ... If I left undone anything within my power to prevent his abdicating, I knew I could never again look into the mirror of my conscience.'
¹³

With Brownlow's help, she prepared a statement for the press:

Mrs Simpson throughout the last few weeks has invariably wished to avoid any action or proposal which would hurt or damage His Majesty or the Throne.

Today her attitude is unchanged, and she is willing, if such action would solve the problem, to withdraw from a situation that has been rendered both unhappy and untenable.
¹⁴

On the afternoon of 7 December she telephoned the Fort and read the statement to Edward over a crackly line. At first, he was unbelieving, then hurt and angry - but he agreed to let her go ahead, when she told him that Perry Brownlow and Herman Rogers had approved the statement. He added, though, that it would make no difference. The abdication documents, he told her, were being drawn up and the Cabinet was meeting that very moment to act upon them. 'Of course you can do whatever you wish', he added. 'You can go wherever you want - to China, Labrador, or the South Seas. But wherever you go, I will follow you.'
¹⁵

In despair, and ready to try anything that had the slightest chance, Wallis resolved to follow the plan through. Brownlow gave her state­ment to the thirty or so correspondents waiting for news at the Hotel Majestic in Cannes. 'That night, for the first time since leaving the Fort five days before,' said Wallis, 'I slept soundly.'
¹⁶
Tom Driberg, a columnist (and later MP), was in a Soho nightclub when news of Wallis's statement came through on the wireless, I was in Frisco's one night', he later recalled, 'when news came through of a public statement by Mrs Simpson starting with the words: "The situation is unhappy and untenable . . ."' In response, he said, 'We pounced on these words, which seemed to fit a West Indian rhythm then favoured by us, and composed a whole calypso around them.' Later, he regretted this reaction as callous: 'So little did we care about the sufferings of that unfortunate woman.'
^1,

Brownlow was heartened by the positive reaction to Wallis's state­ment from the reporters, who believed that it would end the crisis. 'For some extraordinary reason,' wrote Dawson sourly in his diary, 'this statement. . . was hailed next morning by the
Daily Express
and placarded all over London as the "End of the Crisis".'
¹⁸
Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor, recommended warning journalists that 'it would perhaps be unfair to the public and all concerned if they did not at the same time point out the other possibility, I.e. abdication.' It was the duty of the press, he insisted, to keep before the public the two alternatives.
¹⁹

Dawson was convinced that Wallis's offer was insincere, it meant, of course, exactly nothing, and was no doubt dictated from London by King Edward's constant solicitude for Mrs S.' He wrote the begin­ning of a leader pointing out that 'the situation was quite unchanged' and left others to finish it, then 'looked in once more on Alec Hardinge.'
²⁰
In fact, his response to Wallis's intervention went well beyond writing a leader. Immediately under the news of Mrs Simpson's statement of her offer to withdraw,
The Times
printed - as a social item - the news that Thelma Furness had arrived the day before at South­ampton on the liner
Queen Mary
from New York. Lady Furness, herself a divorced woman, had been Edward's lover when he was Prince of Wales before he fell in love with Mrs Simpson. This little item in the paper therefore reminded the reader of the King's history of affairs with married women. As the official history of
The Times
later observed, the newspaper's influence on the abdication was 'not undeserving of mention'. Dawson, it observed, conducted matters with 'supreme skill and vigour!'
²¹
His biographer has commented that Dawson's role was perhaps only second in importance to that of Baldwin.
²²

Some members of the public were as cynical as Dawson about Wallis's motives. '"End of the crisis", blithely announces the
Express
today' was the diary comment of a salesman working for the London department store, Peter Robinson. 'This on the strength of Mrs S's offer to withdraw from the match. Offer is the operative word which is in effect anything but a solution to the difficulty. It merely amounts to challenging the King: "Desert me now if you dare" . . . End of crisis be damned. It's hardly begun yet.'
²³
A saleswoman at Barkers, another department store in the capital, made similar comments in her own diary: 'Mrs Simpson gave a message to the effect that she was "willing to withdraw if it will help the situation" - that is not good enough', she wrote on 8 December. 'The British Public can see through that - she should withdraw instead of putting the onus on the King - it isn't as though she were a British subject.'
²⁴

But the fact that Wallis was ready to give Edward up showed that she was not, as had been claimed, cold and calculating. 'Mrs Simpson's recent gesture', wrote a working man in Cumberland to the King, 'shows a splendid trait in her character.'
²⁵
One woman felt a strong sense of female solidarity with Wallis. 'I feel that I must', she wrote to Edward,
send you the expression of my pride in one who has offered to give up all her chances of happiness because of her great affection. A man has his work, apart from his private life, & he cannot quite realise what the renunciation may mean to a woman . .. this wonderful love will be for you a guiding star, & an inspiration ever present in hours of difficulty & depression.

Another woman, an unemployed dancer, begged Edward not to accept Wallis's generous offer. 'They are trying to make you a slave, a slave to tradition, to power, to money,' she implored him, 'but your people won't WISH this sacrifice . . . Don't let them beat you, and please don't fail her. Remember, that although she has offered to stand aside, she is praying as only a woman can, "Please God give him back to me".' She added, 'I'm praying the same prayer on my own account. We are satisfied with your choice. She's very beautiful, but more than that, there's sweet sympathy and understanding in her eyes . . . Read the
Daily Mirror
and the loyal letters . . . There's 8 of us here think the same.'
²⁷
'All the members of this family', wrote a mother, 'send you their heartfelt devotion and sympathy, and beg you not to accept the lady's resignation. Stand firm! The people are behind you!'
²⁸

Letters of support and sympathy were still arriving daily for the King - from families, sometimes signed by every member; from whole streets, cafes or shops; and from individuals. 'Stand your corner, marry the woman of your choice', urged a Sheffield ex-serviceman on 8 December. 'The Country will support you, it is unable to express itself, it has no means to do
so ...
I am a wartime Coldstreamer No. 20905. I would take up arms for you if necessary and for mak­ing your choice the Queen.'
²⁹
Every wish for his happiness and success was sent from a woman who had worked as a voluntary social worker at the Mobberley Child Welfare Centre in Cheshire for forty years.
³⁰
How proud the people of Scotland would be, said another letter, if their King were to marry the Queen of his choice in Crathie parish church or in St Giles Cathedral.
³¹
Cinema-goers were still showing their support for the King. 'Only last night at a Cinema,' wrote one woman,
it was so wonderful to see and hear the applause you received when your picture was shown on the screen, and words to the effect that the whole nation goes out to you in sympathy during this crisis, and when we all stood to attention, quite a lump came to my throat, and I prayed so hard that we would not lose you.
³²